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Fundraising

We give back to our local communities both through monetary donations from our people and by contributing time and skills to a wide range of community initiatives. Often, our efforts straddle both. Around the world we have in place a range of volunteering programs that draw on our charitable partnerships and internal committees. Our offices regularly hold fundraising initiatives, from dress-down days to regular annual events, and we focus on helping organizations which share our own focus on supporting disadvantaged people and bringing about social justice. Some of our activities draw the participation of colleagues from our offices across the world, including our annual fundraising for the global Movember campaign to support men’s health problems. In other cases, our people raise funds and volunteer their time in order to help meet specific local needs.

Some of our fundraising highlights include:

Global fundraising

Movember

In 2011, a small group of male colleagues decided to support Movember. Their moustache-growing and associated fundraising soon went viral, and now, each year, many of our men around the world grow a moustache to raise funds and awareness for men’s health, supported by our Mo Sistas, as part of the Movember campaign.

Since 2011 we have raised US$266,000, with all donations going to The Movember Foundation, Prostate Cancer and The Institute of Cancer Research for their work on men’s health problems including prostate and testicular cancer, and mental health issues.

The United States

Dear Santa program for PS 131

Starting in 2017, our New York office has been participating in a program that provides holiday gifts to low-income public school students in New York City. The office has adopted PS 131, an elementary school for pre K-fourth grade students in Brooklyn.

Nearly 40 percent of the school’s students are English-language learners, 55 percent are Hispanic and a third are Asian. Students write letters, some of them heartbreaking, asking for specific gifts. (Several students have sought boots for their little sisters, whose boots leak in the winter.) The New York office has responded by providing hundreds of students with gifts annually.

Fundraising in Canada

United Way

In 2019, across Canada, we donated over C$616,000 to the United Way/Centraide, an organization dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty and social exclusion by investing donations in agencies and projects that bring people together. For more than three decades, we have raised money for United Way in order to help towards improving lives locally by moving people from poverty to possibility, helping children be all they can be and building strong and healthy communities.

Europe, Middle East and Asia

Action for children

Byte Night is Action for Children’s biggest annual fundraiser, for which volunteers join forces for a national ‘sleep-out’ event. Each year, hundreds of people from the technology and business world, including a team from our London office, give up their beds for a night to help some of the 83,000 young people who are homeless in the UK through no fault of their own. Byte Night has raised more than £10m since its debut in 1998; we are proud that we have contributed £850,000 of this total.

Supporting Fukushima survivors

Our Tokyo team continues to volunteer time and money to help people in Fukushima after a major earthquake and tsunami hit the Tohoku region of Japan in 2011. This caused the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in Fukushima. Those who survived were evacuated and placed in temporary housing. For them, the impact of this disaster has had long-term consequences. We have donated a total of ¥2,400,000 (US$21,705) to this cause.

Australia

Cerebral Palsy Alliance

In 2018, our Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane offices participated in ‘Steptember’, a fundraising initiative for the Cerebral Palsy Alliance in Australia, which supports people living with cerebral palsy, along with their families, as well as other neurological and physical disabilities. The Alliance focus on assisting babies, children, teenagers and adults to lead independent and fulfilling lives. The Cerebral Palsy Alliance is also committed to driving research into the prevention, treatment and cure of cerebral palsy.

The ‘Steptember’ challenge required participants to commit to taking a minimum of 10,000 steps per day for 28 consecutive days. By participating in this, we raised A$31,000 for the Cerebral Palsy Alliance.